Sudden strange spike in app downloads from china on iTunesConnect?

Several years ago I released an app (a free game) for iOS, which was largely unsucessful, settling to around an average of 5 downloads a month (terrible, I know). However, I recently happend to notice a huge (relatively) spike in downloads, up to around 300 downloads over the last 10 days.

Something seems strange about this latest batch of downloads however, for one thing they are all from China (My app is only localized for English, and never marketed outside the U.S.), and the "Active devices (opt-in only)" statistic shows 3 devices used over that same time period.

Even stranger, the "Product Page Views" statistic shows only 6 views over this same period that had 300 downloads?!

Is something nefarious going on, or might there be a benign explanation for this huge spike in downloads?

If anyone is curious, or if it helps find the cause, the app is Acorn Mayhem, as found here. (Note: this is not intended as self promotion, and if including the link violates stack overflow rules, feel free to edit it out)

in response to being put on hold: This question appears to have been put on hold as "off topic", I don't belive it should be, it does involve tools used directly and exclusively for programming (iTunes connect, which is only used by programmers) It would not be seen by the people who actually use it if it was on superuser, and I think the number of other people who have experienced the same problem and replied in a short time shows that it is on topic and helpful to a large portion of the programming community.

There is a thread on Apple forums about the issue https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/84146

I reported this to Apple yesterday through iTunesConnect and received a call back today (my spike started 8/16 and is just starting to trail off now). They are investigating this; the call lasted over 10 minutes. They promised to keep me in the loop so I will report back when I hear something.

same here too. a game I released a year ago had very few downloads. Over the last two months I have seen a slight increase in downloads, 1 or 2, maybe up to 5 per day, all from China. All of a sudden in the last week I have seen 50, 80, and yesterday it peaked at 123 downloads.

I should also mention, this is a free game, with AdMob adverts.

Either the people who download the game aren't actually playing it at all (not one single ad show in China) or AdMob just doesn't work in China ???

either way - I've had about 500 downloads in the last week compared to ~300 in the entire previous year.

there is an IAP to upgrade the game and remove ads, needless to say, not one single user has paid.

a very strange situation. I wish I knew what was driving the Chinese downloads but I can't find anything pointing to my game ?! Also iTunes Connect seems to say they are coming from store browsing ?!

curiouser and curiouser ...

Similar story here: I have 2 apps, that I made about 2 years ago basically for fun. They get about 20-35 downloads per day. Since 17 Aug, they receive about 120-150 per day, all the extra downloads from China. These numbers don't have any effect on my admob performance, and no significant changes on firebase. I call them ghost-downloads. I switched one of the apps from free to paid. The downloads for that app went down to zero (as I expected)

If you want to have an accurate real user traffic stats, check the "Daily Active Users" & "Daily Active Devices" from itunes connect as reference.

From my own stats, I can see there are extra ~100 download spike daily from Chinese market, but the DAU stays the same, which means these downloads were not initiated by users, might be a 3rd party app crawler automated the crawling for apps using simulators or automation iOS devices. So don't worry about it, the trend should go away in a while.

If you are curious which 3rd party app crawlers are downloading your apps, google "[your app name] + 应用", you should find tons of them. Websites like these crawl lots of app data and run SEO to attract traffic, and benefits from online advertisements (adsense, etc.)

I have the same phenomenon across free apps in the App store. It results in approximately 1000 downloads from China per day, spread pretty evenly across about 15 apps. Each app download is around 100-200MB so that implies a reasonable burden on the App store servers if it is happening with other apps also. I contacted Apple and they did not seem to ask anything but questions that clearly indicated a complete lack of interest in understanding the issue. They suggested that the problem was not a problem but a volume download program. They then asked to see screenshots from affected users.

The exact same thing happened to me (hundreds of extra downloads per day from China only) within the past week. It's not just one app but every one I have created so far. At first I thought it was an iTunes Connect bug but maybe my apps were just featured somewhere public? There are over a Billion people there after all. ;)

I would like to confirm this, and share some data as well. Take a look. The deviation in traffic started around mid of July, and all of my apps have been downloaded roughly in the same amount. Few days ago I noticed that downloads returned to their normal level. All of abnormal purchases took place from China. Maybe this will shed some light on the source, but I doubt that this traffic generated by real people.

At first I thought this was great news, a lot of downloads, but then my cynical side popped in. Perhaps they are downloading the IPAs unzipping them and looking at the source code. They would only have the front end, but that's half the solution. Here is an article about pirated apps

https://www.cultofmac.com/224075/china-has-its-own-app-store-that-lets-users-install-pirated-ios-apps-without-jailbreaking/

You want to look for ways to obfuscate your code.

Updates:

1. By the end of September my abnormal Chinese ghost-downloads have disappeared. Everything is back to normal.

2. On the 8th of September I experienced something much more extreme an unexpected: Approximately 6000 "downloads" from Sweden. It happened only once.